Telstar

Telstar, series of communications satellites whose successful launching, beginning in 1962, inaugurated a new age in electronic communications. The first experimental communications satellite was made in 1960 by John Robinson Pierce of Bell Telephone Laboratories in the United States, who seized the opportunity presented by the planned launching of Echo 1, an aluminum-coated balloon satellite. At Pierce’s instigation, Echo was equipped to receive telephone signals and reflect them back to Earth. Telstar, a far more sophisticated conception, was designed to amplify a signal received from the ground and to relay it back to another ground station. Weighing only 77 kg (170 pounds), it was powered by nickel-cadmiumbatteries, recharged by 3,600 solar cells, and contained more than 1,000 transistors. Its heart was a traveling-wave tube capable on its own of amplifying signals 10,000 times, and far more with the aid of other components. Following Telstar’s launch on July 10, 1962, a giant movable horn antenna near Andover, Maine, locked onto the satellite when its shifting orbit (apogee 5,600 km [3,500 miles]) reached an appropriate point. Minutes later the first television pictures were transmitted across the Atlantic Ocean and received, via relay stations in England and France, on European television screens. Telephone, telegraph, data, telephoto, and facsimile transmissions were also successfully made.

Telstar 1, launched July 10, 1962, relayed the first transatlantic television signals.NASA

Telstar 1 relaying the first transatlantic television signals, 1963.Stock footage courtesy The WPA Film Library

Telstar operated successfully until February 1963, when it ceased to communicate, probably as a result of radiation from American nuclear-weapons testing in the atmosphere. Telstar 2, a heavier but basically similar satellite, was launched on May 7, 1963, into a higher orbit (apogee 10,720 km [6,700 miles]). Successors to Telstar were placed in higher circular orbits, permitting them to keep fixed positions in respect to Earth; three such satellites can provide continuous transmission to practically all points on the globe.